


of the thrills and perils of slut-shaming hedgehogs

by Utopiste



Category: I Am Not Okay with This (TV 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Healthy Coping Mechanisms, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Anger Management, Brief mentions of masturbation, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, Seriously So Much Swearing Guys, Stan is the best bro and a decent kisser, Swearing, We're gonna get you some fucking therapy bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22988668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Utopiste/pseuds/Utopiste
Summary: “Anger management issues,” she repeats to Stan and Dina. “The school counselor said I have them.”“Whaaat?” Stan says, trying and failing to sound surprised.Dina, who stopped being wary of her five feet of pure, unadulterated rage a long time ago, snorts. “Yeah, I have no idea why she would say that. You’re super chill.”Syd Novak is a boring 17-year-old-girl, she’s not special, and she definitely doesn’t have any supernatural powers. Her life still sucks.
Relationships: Liam Novak & Sydney Novak, Stanley Barber & Sydney Novak, Sydney Novak/Dina
Comments: 32
Kudos: 336





	1. teenage dirtbag

**Author's Note:**

> Me: see Syd  
> Me: we’re gonna GET you some THERAPY, angry child
> 
> As a note I talk about anger management issues here. Although I certainly am smol and very angry all of the time, I don’t have AMI (that I know of) so I might get stuff wrong, if I do please tell me! Also the advice the school counselor gives Syd is pulled from mental health websites not because I’m lazy but because I figure that’s probably realistic from a school counselor tbh, and I doubt it would actually be enough, but yeah let’s start with a little self care ok Syd, she can have a little self-care. As a treat

A month after she gave her the diary, the school counselor tells Sydney she has anger management issues, to which she holds back a _yes, duh._ She could have told her that a year ago. No need to waste five years on a useless psychology degree to figure that one out, Sherlock.

Still, the counselor also asks her nicely if she can look inside her diary, thumbing the pages, and when Syd tells her _what?_ _no,_ fast and firm, kind of panicked at the mere thought of another person reading it all, she tells her _alright_ and hands it back. It’s not much, but it’s one thing Syd has control of in her life. It feels good. She writes about it that night and then rips off the pages about her awkward sex with Stan to hide them in her desk drawer. 

“Anger management issues,” she repeats to Stan and Dina. “She said I have them.” 

For once, the latter is sitting with them at the cafeteria. Dina does a weird balancing act between her best friend and her boyfriend. If she sits with Syd and Stan at lunch, she will go drink milkshakes with Brad and his asshole friends after school. If she lets him walk her to her locker in the morning, she sneaks out during their afternoon break to smoke a joint with Syd and Stan under the bleachers. Syd feels like she is in a fucking divorced situation with Bradley Lewis, of all people. 

She doesn’t like it, but it’s better than having no Dina at all, her being distant and weird and so unlike her like in the first two weeks of their relationship. So she sucks it up. She stuffs it deep inside her in a box covered in yellow tape that says _DO NOT TOUCH,_ pretends nothing is happening and kicks Brad’s car’s taillight so hard it breaks the evening he comes to get Dina at Syd’s place because he wants to introduce her to his parents over dinner. Her foot aches for three days afterward, plus she feels kind of like an idiot and kind of like a dick about it, but the way Brad cowers in front of his pissed off dad at the car repair place as Stan and her camp it out for a weed delivery is worth it. 

Hence: anger issues. 

“Whaaat?” Stan says, trying to sound surprised. He is so unconvincing it borders on sarcastic, but he cowers a little under her glare. 

Dina, who has known her long enough to stop being scared of five feet of pure, unadulterated rage, just snorts. “Yeah, I have no idea why she would say that. You’re _super_ chill.”

Stan forgets that he is still sort of intimidated by Syd and chuckles. She crosses her arms and tries her best to look tough, even if she sort of wants to smile. “Yeah, you’re terrible friends. You know, this is why they think I have anger issues.”

“All I’m getting from this is that I’m your friend,” Stan tells her, “which makes it the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Over the next three days, Syd kicks another garbage can and flees the scene, almost shaves off her hair entirely for a buzzcut on a whim, narrowly misses getting into detention for banging her head against her desk when her biology teacher starts talking about people who failed the last exam as if she wasn’t one of the only three losers who did not pass, and gets into about a bazillion fights with her mother.

“Do you think I’m crazy, Mister Wigglesworth?” she asks her brother’s tween hedgehog like a crazy person.

Banana does not answer. 

She is spending her Sunday afternoon lying on her belly on the couch, face propped up on her hands as she watches him wiggle around in his box towards the snack Liam gave him. Stan’s father is in town again, and Dina is with Brad, and she has no other friends, so this is how she spends her Sunday. Yipee. Even her _brother_ has better shit to do, or she guesses so, since she dropped him off at a friend’s birthday party before lunch.

Syd takes away Banana’s snack and holds it right above him, too high for him to reach. He stands on his back legs and stretches, squeaking. “Mmh, interesting opinion, Doctor Wigglesworth. Do you think they should take me away?”

The door clicks open. “Are you talking to Banana again?” Liam asks her, not judgemental, plain curiosity in his voice. Liam is the only person she has who knows she is a weirdo but does not make her feel bad about it. She hopes he never grows up.

“Yep. He’s not much of a conversationalist, though. He keeps telling me about that time you, Goober, peed the bed last year.”

“That was one time!” Liam protests.

“Mmmh, that’s not what _he_ is telling me, though,” she says, making a face, and he gasps in indignation as he rushes in to take his precious pet in his hands. Banana actually squeaks in joy, even though she is pretty sure he has no idea who the fuck Liam is. Go figure. 

On Monday, her mother yells at Syd because she didn’t buy the right kind of bread when she got groceries, and she grinds her teeth so hard they hurt until she snaps at her right back. The shouting match that ensues ends with her mother crying and her slamming the door to her bedroom violently enough for the crap on the shelf mounted to the wall to fall down. She doesn’t pick it up and it pisses her off every time she looks at it as she paces. 

That night she sneaks out after dinner and hangs out with Stan eating peanut butter out of the jar and listening to his new records until she falls asleep on his beat-up couch and has to sneak back in at five a.m., crossing the living room to the sight of her mother asleep on their own beat-up couch, empty glass of wine on the table.

On Tuesday, Brad and Dina start violently making out against Syd’s locker. They don’t hear her _hello_ in the noise of the high school crowd and she stares at them until her hands start shaking and her neck is burning and her heartbeat speeds like crazy and her head is spinning and eventually one of Brad’s jock friends claps his shoulder, wolf-whistling, which breaks them off. The friend makes a joke about Syd enjoying the show while Dina rubs the back of her hand over her lips, gloss ruined, sheepish but smiling. Instead of going to her next period (fucking _Sex Ed_ out of everything), Syd walks right out to smoke under the bleachers. Lunch comes and goes to her being even more of a sarcastic asshole than usual to Stan. 

On Wednesday she actually gets caught under the bleachers, joint already stubbed under her shoe, which means the teacher is suspicious but not so sure of herself that she does anything worse than sending Syd and Stan to detention. She knows she should feel relieved it didn’t turn out worse but all she really feels is a desire to scream so intense she winds up talking back to the teacher and earns herself another Saturday of detention. When she gets home that night she picks up a pair scissors and an old dress her grandmother got her when she was twelve, a pink and fluffy monstrosity she only wore at family dinners where it would itch her back until she thankfully outgrew it, and rips it apart. She pushes the remnants of it next to the broken snowglobe of her wall shelf, then shoves everything under her bed. Her hands bleed. 

On Thursday, Syd sees the counselor again. Neither of them talks for the first ten minutes. The counselor just looks at her with that patient fucking smile on her lips, as if in the longest stare-off ever, until Syd is the one to break.

“Are there meds?”

To her credit, the counselor doesn’t bat an eyelash. “What for?”

“Teenage pregnancy,” Syd deadpans, and then, immediately: “Anger issues.”

“Anger _management_ issues, Syd.”

“Sure.”

“Your feelings aren’t the issue,” she insists, which Syd thinks is a joke, but sure, “it’s just about finding healthier ways of release.” It sounds like a sex thing. Syd doesn’t point it out. “For instance, a coping mechanism could be counseling, which you already are doing, of course, but also talking to people about what is making you angry,” not a chance, she would rather choke than tell anyone about her shitty mom and her shitty crush on her not-shitty best friend, “ or exercise.” Ha! 

“Yeah, sure, great,” Syd says, already looking back at the clock. Only nineteen more minutes to go.

“What do you do when you feel yourself getting angry?”

Syd shrugs and considers saying nothing, but she actually likes the counselor, she’s really trying, which is a lot more than other adults at the school do, so she tells her: “I don’t know, I just.” Say something bitchy that makes everyone hate her. “Try not to say anything. ” 

Then she almost inevitably says something, and it’s almost always the wrong thing to say so that it blows into a fight, or people look at her like she’s a freak - which she starts more and more to believe she is. Or she manages to stay quiet and people look at her like she’s a freak because she’s being too silent and glaring too much and generally being too weird and the anger only gets worse, bigger and hotter inside of her, until it’s as if it was under her skin, all of it, and she has to do something so she doesn’t burst right open like a thigh zit. 

“How about next time this happens, be it in a week,” fat chance, “or in a day, you try to give yourself time to think before reacting. Try counting up to ten and focusing on taking deep, slow breaths. We can train with calming breathing exercises if you want.”

That sounds like the most awkward yoga lesson in the history of men, and also kind of like bullshit, like those people who told her father doing the underdog position three times a week would cure his depression. On the other hand, it takes away the odds of the remaining eighteen minutes of session being dedicated to getting Syd to talk about her feelings.

“Sure, why not.”

“So, I was thinking,” Dina starts, a look on her face that tells Syd she isn’t going to like what follows, at all, but Dina will make sad, puppy eyes at her and she’ll say yes anyway, “you and Brad have been getting along more lately.”

Syd focuses on the straw wrapper she is starting to rip into tiny white bits like dandruff flakes on the table of the dinner. If by getting along Dina means firmly avoiding him in the name of their “truce” because Syd doesn’t know if she can talk to his douchebag face without her sparkly, pepful personality showing through, then yes. If she means actually _getting along,_ then fuck no. There is no way to tell her that, though, so Syd just hums noncommittally. 

“And maybe, we could all hang out next Friday? I mean, you, me, and Brad, and you can bring Stan, too!” Dina says really fast as if it would make it less like something that would lead to Syd sticking a fork in her eye. 

“You mean like, a double date? With the guy I dumped at homecoming?” Hadn’t that been awkward as hell. “That guy?”

Without looking up, Syd knows Dina well enough to just _know_ she is tilting her head tentatively, raising her shoulders and making that pouty face she makes sometimes. “Or not with Stan. Whatever, really.”

“So either a double date or third-wheeling,” Syd translates. “Yeah, gee, Dina, I’m not sure-”

_“Please.”_

Dina’s hand sneaks up to Syd’s, her long, graceful fingers on her tiny, chubby ones with the nails all bitten off. Syd can see where her blue nail polish started rubbing off and her palm is so soft over hers, grasping gently but firmly. Her heart speeds up all of a sudden. Fuck.

She makes the mistake of looking up.

Dina is leaning on the table towards her, wide dark eyes fixed on her face, searching. Trying not to stare at them Syd focuses down - her mouth set in a worried line, her lips still then full and pretty, shiny where she reapplied strawberry lip balm before sharing it with Syd, and the taste still lingers against her tongue, the same taste Dina’s lips would have if she leaned a little further-

Syd jerks back. Hurt flashes across Dina’s face. “Sure!” Syd says, too loud, voice too high, before getting it back under control. “Why not. It could be fun.”

“It could?” Dina asks, smiling like she doesn’t quite believe Syd said that, but still smiling.

“About as much as when I was eight and my mom told me we were going to Disneyland and brought me to the dentist. But whatever. I can try to get along with Brad when you’re hanging out with Stan and me all the time.” It sickens Syd to compare Stan with Brad, and she’s going to do something extra nice next time they hang out, like let him win at _Mario Kart_ on his old dingy Gamecube even if he keeps picking Princess Peach and then sucking. 

“Yeah, but that’s because you’re _cool,”_ Dina reminds her, words mocking and eyes soft.

“True, we _are_ very cool.”

This week goes better than the last one. Sure, Syd has to do makeup work to try to salvage her biology grade, which means she spends that Sunday afternoon after talking with Dina doing her extra credit paper at the dinner table. Mostly because Dina walks her through it. And generally makes her do it in advance rather than the night before like she had planned to. Hey, nobody said Syd was the good influence here.

An afternoon of biology still is an afternoon with Dina, her hair brushing against Syd’s cheeks, smelling of her banana-coconut conditioner, whenever she leaned closer to see what Syd was writing. She comes home and washes her face and changes into an Elliott Smith T-shirt that Syd just knows is Stan’s, firstly because she would never buy an _Elliott Smith T-shirt,_ secondly because it almost fits her whereas Syd’s actual clothes are always two sizes too big or stolen from her dad’s closet. She is lying in bed for all of ten minutes before Dina texts her. Then Syd is thinking about the way her hair felt against her skin and how nice it smelled and the way her fingers drummed against the table when she focused and she sort of wants to touch herself. Then she is thinking about how gross and creepy and weird it would be, about Dina’s face if she knew that Syd thought of her and then masturbated, and she feels sick - there’s a tight grip around her chest like she’s about to panic - so she closes her eyes and tries to let her breath flow into her belly, slow and steady, in through her nose then out through her mouth, counting from one to five. 

When she doesn’t feel about to freak out anymore, but still sort of wants to puke, she puts on music very loud in her headphones, first trying Bloodwitch then when it doesn’t work Joy Division, and she jumps on her bed until she is out of breath and her mother is knocking on her door and she is too tired to feel shitty about herself anymore in more than that abstract, kind of distant way that follows her around all the fucking time.

On Monday, Stan proofreads the biology essay during his first period, in which he has AP something and she is stuck in English listening to the teacher talk about Holden Caulfield having an identity crisis (plot twist, everyone is fucking having one, Holden). 

It’s just the two of them at lunch, where he talks about a new _X-Men_ comics storyline about getting sucked into a pocket universe that exists inside a telepath’s head and the telepath is Professor X’s son, who has crazy hair, and everyone is kind of weird. Syd doesn’t really give a shit about _X-Men_ but she tries to be less of a dick about it and it actually becomes pretty interesting - if anything, Stan explaining something then having to backtrack to fifty years of comics or else she won’t really understand how important it is, then getting confused in his own explanation is pretty entertaining. He speaks with his hands moving everywhere wildly and forgets to eat his lunch. It’s adorable, even if he has to shove it all into his mouth as he runs to class. 

On Tuesday, Syd picks up her brother from school in Stan’s car, fiddling with the radio because Stan “doesn’t believe in CDs”. 

“Hey, Goober,” she says, looking up briefly to catch him frowning curiously.

“Hey, what’s that weird smell?”

“Uh- it’s-” Stan begins sputtering, but Syd takes it in stride.

“What do you mean?”

“That… Smell. You know, it’s like- I know I smelled that before.”

“Oh, that smell?” she says. “Yeah, like in dad’s car, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“It’s just what cars smell like. It’s the oil.”

“Uh,” Liam says, and forgets about it instantly in favor of watching a pretty girl waving at him outside the window.

In spite of Syd's best efforts, as soon she meets Stan’s eyes in the rearview mirror, they both crack up. 

It’s almost like a nice day until her mother makes her buy groceries again, and there’s not enough money for them, _again,_ so she humiliates herself in front of the clerk by having to put some back. She wishes this did not keep happening. Getting angry until she winds up kicking stuff in the grocery store again will not help her situation, though, so Syd closes her eyes, tries to unclench her fists and focus on breathing, imagines a future where she is really fucking rich, probably a rock star. In her head, she walks inside the store with cool sunglasses and a leather jacket to open her wallet full of hundred dollar bills nonchalantly in front of the clerk, who still works here because she has done nothing with her life. Soon enough the fantasy only reminds her that none of it is ever going to happen, which is depressing. It sucks, but at least she doesn’t want to kick the Doritos off the shelves anymore. Staying in her room, she mopes all evening and manages to avoid her mother long enough that she can’t yell at her when she realizes there is no milk in the fridge.

Wednesday is the day before her biology makeup work is due, so she hands it in early on Stan’s advice to show she is making an effort. The teacher looks so surprised it’s insulting and Syd doesn’t pay attention in the next class - it’s US government anyway, so who cares. She breaks pencils during that class. A lot of them. Then she has PE and runs so fast she doesn’t have the energy to be angry anymore. Maybe the counselor had a point about exercising, but she isn’t about to tell her so. 

“Hey. Hey. Heyyyyy,” Stan keeps repeating while she walks to the cafeteria, jogging up to her to poke her sweaty shoulder with insistence.

“Oh my god _what.”_

“I have a surprise for you,” he singsongs. “Come with me.”

“Is the surprise that you’ve finally snapped and become a serial killer?”

“Hilarious.”

“Golly, Stanley, are you taking me to your evil den? Are you going to cut off my face and-”

“No, you weirdo,” Stan says instead of going along with her, obviously put off. Syd feels a little guilty just looking at him, so she rolls her eyes and takes the hand he offers with a little bow. He guides her out of the building and through the empty gymnasium, then into the closet full of jerseys and balls that manage to always smell like sweat and rubber, at which point she is kind of afraid he will try to make out with her. Not that the prospect is so revolting - for all the awkwardness of their first time in itself, Stan is, in her albeit limited experience, a decent enough kisser - but considering everything that happened since they met, friends with benefits might _not_ be the best idea for them. 

Instead he drops her hand and starts jumping.

“What the hell,” Syd says. 

“Just- ngh- wait- ah- for- it-” he says, huffing with the effort, the unathletic dweeb, until he manages to graze his hand against a latch she didn’t notice, then falls back. To avoid his disappointed puppy face, she looks around at the room. More sweaty fluorescent jerseys, an entire wheeled shelving unit for the school's basketballs, and finally, in the corner of the room, under the lost-and-found gym clothes they force students to wear if they try to pretend they forgot their bags - she knows this from experience - a big, empty wooden box.

Uh. She drops her lunch bag at her feet.

“Move,” she orders Stan, who keeps jumping like an idiot.

“No- ah- I’m almost- there-”

“Please stop making weird sex noises and _move.”_

He does, frowning and pouting all along until she pushes off the cardboard full of clothes to get her hands on the box and pull it with all of her strength, which is admittedly not a lot. She manages to get it under the latch, climb up, and open the latch.

Stan gapes at her. “You beautiful bastard.”

“You’re welcome,” Syd smirks, inordinately pleased with herself for someone who just played along with Stan’s strange shenanigans. When she gets off the box, he takes her place, sticks his hand in the empty circle where the latch was and asks: “Drumroll, please?”

Syd considers telling him to fuck off but remembers she is trying to be less of a dick and starts hitting her thighs rhythmically. He begins to hum the _Star Wars_ theme loudly, pulls, and then, dropping from the hole in the ceiling - a ladder.

He shifts his humming to singing in all the wrong notes: “Come with me, and you’ll be, in a world of pure imagination-”

“If I follow you, will you stop?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

Syd pretends to sigh as she follows him up with tired legs.

It turns out Stan maybe was right to be so hyped since he managed to sneak them both onto the roof of the gym. He whirls around to show off and, after a beat, she follows him, laughing a little hysterically as she does. They eat lunch here, watching the empty football field, wind in their hair, smiles so wide it hurts Syd’s cheeks. Stan dubs it their new _spot,_ which means they will get to smoke weed there instead of socializing with the others sober. That is fine by her. 

Syd acts blasé about it later when writing it down in her diary but honestly, it _is_ pretty awesome. She lets him win at _Mario Kart_ that evening. Then she gets into a fight with her mother about groceries, for a change. Nothing else really happens. 

Thursday is the day her biology teacher gives her her essay back, early, with some stuff pointed out so she can correct it and hand it again tomorrow, he says, as a reward for giving it to him early. If Syd works out the flaws, she should be able to have full marks. She wants to ask Dina for help again but she doesn’t know how to without it being embarrassing, so she locks herself in the library during lunch break with her book and tries to figure the right answers out, after reading the essay to take notes during Sex Ed. This also enables her to not be so exasperated by dumb guys talking about their dicks during class, so, all in all, it’s a win-win situation. Syd tells the school counselor all about it so that she has some good news every once in a while to report and show she’s good at her job. It is all exhausting, but as far as days go, it’s pretty okay. Turns out Syd is having a remarkably not-shitty week so far.

Of course, it would be too easy for her to end it on that note. Mr. Wigglesworth is sick, according to Liam - he just seems asleep to her - so she convinces Stan to drive them to the veterinarian.

“Uh, does your veterinarian treat hedgehogs?” Stan asks. “Because, you know, that seems like a pretty weird specialization-” she nudges the soft side of his belly with her sharp skinny elbow and he yelps.

“What kind of veterinarian _doesn’t_ treat hedgehogs?” she says too loudly instead in her best Stepford Smiler voice. It is better if they go there, she convinces the veterinarian to act as if he was giving that fucking thing an inspection, then they tell Liam everything is okay and get to go home.

Even then, the car ride is spent in tense silence, Liam staring at Banana with an intense, worried expression on his face, Stan glancing at them both awkwardly, a little disbelieving still in a way she can’t very much blame him for. Syd can’t believe this is what her life has come to. Faking emergency medical procedures on a hedgehog they found in the garbage. 

As it turns out, veterinarians are busy people too. They have to sit in the waiting room for _forever,_ Liam only getting increasingly more stressed out, fidgeting with his hands until she grabs them firmly in one of hers. Then she grabs Stan’s for good measure. She doesn’t hold Banana’s paws, but it’s not for lack of trying. After a few more minutes, Liam leans against her side, and then Stan takes it as an invitation to do the same somehow - before she knows it he is asleep against her, mouth slack and warm against her neck. She remembers when he tried his hardest to give her a hickey as they made out, without much success since she got impatient before he did anything more than a pinkish mark, then scolds herself for thinking about making out when her little brother is right _there._

“Syd?” he asks somewhere against her arm. She doesn’t dare turn her head for fear of waking Stan. “Can I ask you something?”

Please don’t ask me about death please don’t ask me about death, she repeats in her head like a mantra. “Of course, Goober. What’s on your mind?”

“I was just wondering. Are you dating Stan?”

She chokes on her own laughter, trying to hold it back. “What? No! What the fuck, Goober? Why are you so interested in my non-existent dating life all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know, it’s a fair question! He drives us around _everywhere_ even though you’re almost always mean to him, except sometimes you’re not even mean to him and it’s even weirder. You’re petting his hair right now,” Liam points out and she quickly slides her hand off his curls, where she had been drawing soothing circles to keep him asleep without paying attention. “And you’re always hanging out at his place.”

“Maybe I’m just avoiding you.”

“Nah, you couldn’t live without me.”

“Wow. Getting a little cocky here, uh?”

He shrugs. “I’m just saying. If he’s your boyfriend you can tell me. I’m not a _baby,_ you know."

Syd sobers up. “Liam, I swear to you, if I ever start dating someone, I will tell you before anyone else. Possibly in a sealed letter. You know, like, _Dear Goober Novak, I hereby officially announce that I, Sydney Novak, sane of-“_

“Uh… Banana… Wigglesworth?” the veterinarian calls out. Syd stands up so suddenly Stan falls from his chair in a heap of gangly limbs. Liam follows more slowly, solemn, his hands grasping at Banana’s box. 

To his credit, after the first instant of reluctance, the veterinarian is very cool about all of it, in spite of them asking for a consultation that a) is for a hedgehog b) takes place near the end of his shift c) will very obviously not be paid for. He hums and awes and inspects the little fucker for a good ten minutes as Liam hovers like a helicopter parent and Syd hangs by the door with Stan, leaning against it and wishing she was at home eating dinner. 

“This,” the veterinarian says very gravely, “is a spectacularly healthy hedgehog.”

“Is he?” Liam says enthusiastically.

“Is he?” Syd says sarcastically. 

“And I hear congratulations are in order.”

“... What?”

“Mister Banana Wigglesworth, or rather Miss Banana Wigglesworth, is pregnant.” 

They stay silent for a very, very long time. And then Stan bends down to stare Banana in her beady little eyes, Banana hanging out on the operation table as she lives her hedgehog life, and says: “Banana Wigglesworth, you _slut."_


	2. friday i'm in love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Syd thinks Dina might be the most beautiful person she has ever met in real life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> big thank you to everyone who commented on the first chapter and gave kudos! It genuinely made my day! also still thank you to Lu whomst I would die for you own my uwus
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: there are slurs in this chapter, as well as light violence, mentions of alcoholism/alcohol use, depictions of weed use (sorry dad), and Dina being not mad, just disappointed. to sum it up this puts the hurt in hurt/comfort and the _oh, man_ in romance

Friday goes about as well as could be expected. 

To be fair to Syd, maybe it wouldn’t have been  _ such _ a shitshow if she hadn’t gotten in a fight with her mother, like, five minutes before leaving. Then again, maybe if she had told her mother in advance that she had detention on Saturday, _ again,  _ so she couldn’t take care of Liam if her mom picked up an extra shift, they wouldn’t have been fighting in the first place. Something about hindsight being twenty twenty.

Syd tries to do the breathing thing, she really tries for at least ten seconds before she can’t focus on it anymore, and she doesn’t really care to, because her mother keeps berating her and who the fuck cares about one-to-five.

“How can you be so irresponsible!” 

“I’m a teenager! I’m supposed to be irresponsible! It’s not my fault you’re never there to take care of your son, okay!” 

“Oh, what, is my working sixty hours a week ruining the high school experience for you?”

“No! It’s not what I- I’m not-” Syd sputters, like whenever her mother reminds her that they’re struggling to make ends meet as if it explained everything. Then, finally: “It’s not my job to be dad!”

“Well, it’s not like your father did a topnotch job on that either, is it?” her mother says coldly. 

This shocks Syd into silence for a second, and then a roar of anger - how dare she insult her dad like this, when he died a year ago, when it’s not like he was here to defend himself, when Syd still misses him so much sometimes the grief shrouds everything like black fog. How dare she not love him anymore the way Syd does.

“Just because,” her mother picks up again, first calm then winding herself up again, mean and meaner, “you have some sort of hero-worship on him doesn’t mean he was a good dad, or even a good husband-”

“Shut up!”

“Wake up, Syd! He was a deadbeat father and-” her mother stops herself. In the quiet that follows, Syd is pretty sure she sees her blinking back tears, but she doesn’t care. 

“You’re just bitchy because we loved him and you don’t know what that’s like. The only thing you care about are fucking groceries and your three bottles of wine a week,” Syd tells her mother, and she knows as she does that it is a really bratty thing to say, but it’s not like her mother is being reasonable and fair either, so: “Fuck, you don’t even  _ like _ me, and the only reason you still like Liam is because he’s still tiny and cute and I’m sorry that I’m not and I’m an asshole and I’m angry all the time and I wear Dad’s sweaters three days in a row and I swear too much and I have no future but maybe the shit apple doesn’t fall so far from the shit tree, okay?”

Syd slams the door on her way out before she has the time to register the expression on her mother’s face.

“Do you have weed?” she asks Stan instantly when she sits down in his living room. They are not supposed to be leaving until a couple more hours, he is still shirtless, and she broke in through the open window.

He screams.

“Chillax, it’s just me,” Syd says and grabs some chips from the bag of Doritos on the table.

“What- and I cannot stress this enough- the _ fuck,  _ Syd,” he says and makes a wild grab for the Dorito bag. 

“Hey, don’t be selfish, I need those!”

“You’re not supposed to be here!”

“Yeah, that’s also what my mother said, so. Whatever.” She scratches at the flaking nail polish on her left hand. Dina painted her nails last Sunday, sitting cross-legged on the backseat of her car with tissues everywhere under their joined hands to avoid stains, so focused her lips parted just the smallest bit open. Syd’s hands tingled where they touched Dina’s, and she couldn’t help glancing up at her face very close to hers. They were the colors of the school football team, which is terribly lame but also means she and Dina matched, which filled her with a weird sense of warmth.

By now, she has bitten the polish away from half the gnawed stumps she calls nails, and the few remaining survivors are not in a promising state.

“Do you, uh, want to talk about it?” Stan finally says, hesitant.

“Nope!”

“Cool. Cool. Uh. Do you want to listen to Joy Division?”

She can’t help it - she beams at him. He  _ does _ know her. “Sure, why not. Can I use your shower first though? And also clothes?”

Stan goes redfaced and turns away quickly at that as he rushes down the stairs, her following close behind, so that he points her to the shower and opens his wardrobe for her too energetically to be natural. It is a testimony to how much Stan is rubbing off on her that Syd finds it funny rather than annoying.

When the time comes to go, Syd has just finished showering, is buttoning up one of Stan’s shirts, a smooth one covered in drawn autumn leaves in a mix of yellow, orange and green than Stan says will look good with her hair, and she is high off her fucking mind. She keeps interrupting herself every other button because ripples in the shirt make the fallen leaves mesmerizing to her, and when she finally looks up to the mirror, her own face seems weird to her, sullen and unreal, as if it was someone else’s. She thinks maybe this is the one time she will have the most clarity on her own appearance, looking at herself from the outside like this, and stares harder. 

Honestly, she isn’t even sure how they make it to Brad’s house. Slowly, probably, because her phone keeps buzzing in her pocket. Without music too - Stan says right now it would just confuse him and focuses on the road with unnatural precision. Syd isn’t against it - they laughed hysterically on the way to the car but now, wind in her hair from the open window, watching the streetlights and old houses go by, the residential neighborhood where the rich people live, or as rich as it gets in Brownsville, she has a strange sense of serenity. More importantly, she sobers up a little.

“Ugh, I’m exhausted,” Stan groans when they arrive, his entire body collapsing against his seat. Syd crunches up the sheet of instructions Dina gave them and throws it at his face without him moving. “I’m going to take a nap here, come and get me when they’re outside.”

“I thought mama didn’t raise no quitter,” she tells him. He doesn’t react and as he flutters his eyes closed, his breath is already evening out, so she opens the door and saunters the few steps to Brad’s house. 

His door opens. She glares at the bell, confused. She is almost certain she didn’t ring it. “Do you have superpowers?” she asks Dina, whose expression morphs from worried to angry.

“You are  _ more than half an hour  _ late.”

“... Oops?”

“Are you high right now?”

Syd pauses. What could encompass the depth of her apology to her very best friend, who she is clearly in love with? What would be enough? “My bad?”

“Syd, seriously-”

“Hey Syd! Fancy seeing you here,” Brad interrupts, walking up behind Dina’s shape in the doorframe and putting his hand on her lower back. He has a wide, friendly smile on his face. That fake asshole.

“Hey Braaaad,” she singsongs, smiling too. “Fancy seeing  _ you _ here.”

It’s a nice night outside. The breeze on the exposed skin of her neck is soothing. She is doing her breathing exercises. 

“It’s my house,” Brad says, and he pushes Dina out as he closes the door. “On an unrelated note, can we please fuck off my front porch before my parents can smell the weed from our living room?”

“But it’s so comfortable,” Syd pouts, leaning on the wall harder. It is. 

“Come on, Syd, let’s go get food,” Dina tells her abruptly and stomps out. Someone is mad.

“I hate watching you go but I love seeing you leave- wait. No,” Syd frowns. “Wrong one.”

Brad whistles slowly. “Barber really is rubbing off on you.”

The trip to the Chinese food joint - one of the only four restaurants they can go to without Syd mother’s working here - is spent in tense silence in Dina’s car. Apparently, Stan driving them anywhere is “dangerous” right now. That doesn’t keep him from shouting shotgun and jumping on the front seat, picking the music as they go along, switching radio at every first note until Woodkid starts crooning and Syd physically pulls him away from the buttons. 

That leaves Brad and Syd in the backseat. She glues herself to the door at her left and carefully stares by the window without noticing much. Now that Syd is sobering up even more - unfortunately - she remembers how much she hates Brad.

Once Dina parks, both Brad and Stan leave the car quickly, motor still hot, to get away from the lingering awkwardness. Syd waits until Dina has finished getting the key out of the ignition and checked her handbrake one last time to follow her out to the parking lot in the icy silence and the warm night air. 

It takes approximately five seconds for Dina to break. “Tonight really means a lot to me, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

“‘Kay, Mom,” Syd jokes, a hesitant tug at the corner of her lips, before looking at Dina’s closed off face and seeing her mistake. “Sorry. I’ve been hanging out with Stan too much.”

“It’s just- Brad is an important part of my life, you know? And you are too. You’re the most-” Dina stops herself. “You’re the person I spend most of my time with outside of my family. And I want you to get along.”

At some point, they have stopped walking. The street is empty. Under a streetlight, yellow washes over Dina’s features, as if she herself was glowing. She’s mesmerizing. Maybe it’s the high, but Syd can’t stop looking at her. 

Sometimes she thinks Dina might be the most beautiful person she has ever met in real life.

“Why do we have to get along, though?” she hears herself say. “Why can’t we just keep, you know, pretending the other doesn’t exist?”

“Because it sucks,” Dina tells her honestly. Her eyes are very steady on Syd’s. It gives her vertigo. “I can’t keep doing this - trying to plan my week so I remember to spend half my evenings with him when we hang out at your place, or eat with him at lunch the day after I go up on the roof with Stan and you, or- whatever. It just- it’s not fair for me either.”

Syd then says something very selfish, something horrible, that she would never have said if she wasn’t still dizzy with weed and Dina’s perfume, Dina’s attention all on her, the way she almost said it, you’re the most important, she says: “Don’t spend time with him then.”

“What?”

“Just don’t- nobody is making you spend time with him. If you’d really- if you’d rather hang out with me, then do that. I’m pretty sure anything Brad can do, I can do better.”

The double-entendre makes Dina raise her eyebrows, and Syd too, breaking off into laughter. It takes a second for Dina to laugh too. It’s not too bad, Syd thinks - if she can pass it off as a joke, and not a terribly shitty thing to say to your best friend, who is miserable because of her. She doesn’t want Dina to know about the monstrous  _ thing _ inside her own skin who thinks about the way Dina blushes after making out with Brad against Syd’s locker filled with all of Syd’s stuff and the way her thighs look under her gym shorts or that pink skirt she is wearing tonight. She already almost blew it kissing her at the party a month or so ago. If Dina realized that the Syd who kissed her at the party was the real Syd, that this was who she was- she would get that weird inscrutable look on her face, the one she got after Syd kissed her when it was like her entire body closed off, the one she gets sometimes when Syd grabs her hoodie sleeve to weave through the waves of students in the hall or stares at her face for a beat too long, the one that makes Syd’s stomach churn. 

The one she has right now, staring Syd down. Syd starts to take a step back but Dina smiles and catches her arms. For a dumb, stupid second, Syd is sure she is going to kiss her.

“You dumbass stoner. You buttoned your shirt up all wrong,” she says instead and - worst than a kiss - she starts unbuttoning it all. Syd’s entire body is on fire. She opens her mouth and closes it and nothing comes out. “It’s a nice shirt, though. I didn’t know you even  _ had _ nice shirts.” 

All she can think about is Dina’s fingers on her collar, popping one button then going lower and lower until she reaches the part where it is tucked into her jeans and gently tugs it out. “It’s not mine,” she blurts out. Thank god for the small, functioning part of her brain that is left. “Stan gave it to me.”

“Oh. You’re wearing Stan’s clothes now?” Dina frowns, eyes only glancing up at Syd’s before they’re strained on her belly again, like that time they danced together except  _ more,  _ because they’re alone at the streetlight and nobody is watching. “I wasn’t aware you two had that relationship update.”

“What?” Syd laughs nervously. It’s weird to feel Dina’s hands tremble against her body as it shakes. “No, it’s just- I got into a fight with my mom, and I didn’t have time to change, and I… Yeah. We’re not. Doing that anymore. I told you. We’re just friends.”

Dina hums, now up to Syd’s collarbone, her thumb brushing against her pulse, and Syd prays to whatever God she doesn’t believe in that she can’t feel her heartbeat out of control, but she doesn’t believe it. “Just friends. Friends like we’re friends?”

Syd’s lips are open. She isn’t sure when they fell open, or why her breath feels so weird against her chapped lips. Dina stopped before the last button and she is looking at her, really looking at her, searching and bright and something else that Syd doesn’t know, and it feels like she is asking her a very important question but Syd doesn’t understand what answer she wants, or else she would give it to her, just like she would give her anything else she asks for. “Of course not,” she finally says. “Not friends like we’re friends.”

The grin Dina gives her at that is so wide and quick Syd can’t help smiling too. She kind of wants to laugh even if nothing funny is happening, simply to let out the tension, maybe, as Dina moves her hands away leaving the last button agape and her collarbone exposed. “We can’t have you looking like a square, Bender.”

For maybe the first time in her life Syd feels like she passed a test she didn’t know she was taking. It’s a nice change from being a fuckup. 

“Bender? I always thought I was more of an Allison myself,” she banters back.

Dina tssks her. “Of course not. I’m pretty sure you would bite me if I tried to give you a makeover.”

“You have.  _ Many _ times.”

“I helped you put on cherry chapstick and a kind of nicer top  _ one time,” _ Dina says. She raises her hands up to her ears as she speaks, and Syd can’t quite tell what she is doing.

“Yep. It was  _ terrifying.” _

Dina rolls her eyes. “Also,” she adds as if Syd hadn’t talked, putting her right hand down again, her fingers closed up in a fist, and taking Syd’s hand in her left, prying it open gently, with a tenderness Syd can’t quite comprehend right now, “the only person I’d give a diamond earring to is you.”

She puts the earring she had on in Syd’s open palm. Syd keeps gaping at her. She must look kind of dumb, but Dina doesn’t seem to mind, taking one last look at her before she leaves to join the others. She says something about keeping them waiting more than was fashionably late, but Syd doesn’t quite listen. The earring is still warm from Dina’s fist. It’s not a diamond earring, just a silly crescent-shaped one they bought at the mall one day Dina dragged her there, at Claire’s, but somehow it feels more important than diamonds do.

Syd looks at the silver crescent in her palm then at the moon in the sky. She puts it on before she runs to the restaurant, even if she has to push a little to unstick the hole in her ear because she hasn’t put on any jewelry but her father’s dog tags in so long.

It is nice that she feels so alright in that moment, because the dinner is - as everyone but Dina expected, she is sure - a shitshow. 

Or rather, it goes well for about twenty minutes, when the boys are jolted out of what seems like the world’s most uncomfortable conversation about sports ever. Sports. Syd wasn’t aware Stan knew of them. They sit down with Dina next to Brad and in front of Syd, their knees brushing every so often, and Stan next to Syd, in front of Brad, to his clear discomfort. They debate the food options (limited) and recent high school gossip (also limited, since Syd doesn’t know anyone, Stan only knows the guys who buy weed from him sometimes, his cousin and Syd, and Brad knows everyone). 

All along, Syd is good. Syd is so good. She laughs at all the right places even if Brad’s jokes are almost always about his dick, football allegories, or plain not funny. Her only way of protest is the pinched, fake smile she uses and the looks she shares with Stan. He is what would come out if you fed an AI with all nine seasons of  _ The Office _ and told it it was what humor was about. Except that’s unfair to  _ The Office, _ which Syd actually kind of likes. 

Then, of course, comes the inevitable disaster.

“Yeah, that Jenny chick is insane,” Brad says, shrugging and grabbing sushi with expert chopstick technique (of course he has perfect chopstick technique): “She goes to that hippie school counselor’s office, like, five times a week.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with going to the counselor’s office,” Dina answers too quickly. Syd glowers at her Cantonese rice. 

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure Emily Fitch went there, like, every week last year, and she was still valedictorian.  _ And _ she got voted most likely to succeed,” Stan adds as if it meant anything. 

Brad realizes he said something dumb. Good boy. “Oh yeah, of course! It’s just- she goes there but totally not like Syd goes there. Jenny is like, clinically  _ insane. _ I’m pretty sure she has actual anger issues.”

“Anger management issues,” Syd contributes. She is still observing the grains of rice. 

“Uh. What?”

“Anger  _ management _ issues is what Ms Cappriotti calls them,” Syd says. 

Another uncomfortable moment of silence before Brad talks again: “Shit, I’m sorry, Dina never told me-”

“Well, Brad, Dina doesn’t tell you everything, does she?” Syd bites back. She can’t help it. Stan’s elbow digs into her side sharply, in warning, but all it does is make her look up back at Brad, who is cringing, but otherwise do not look so sorry.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Nothing,” Dina soothes. “Don’t worry.” 

“Yeah, I think Syd is just coming down from her high,” Stan says. 

“No, I’m really asking. What does that mean, Syd?” Brad says. He is looking straight at her, but she is not. Dina is wide-eyed and tight-lipped, every bit as panicked as a deer in the headlights where Brad is all cocky annoyance. 

“Nothing. I think I need some air,” Syd announces to the table as she gets up, which means Stan has to either scoot over or get up too in the narrow space which is only getting more and more cramped. He chooses the latter. 

As Stan pulls the chair to get back down, Brad pushes his. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

Syd is pretty sure no one is fooled about him following her out, but they don’t stop him. He doesn’t even pretend to head towards the men’s room. She hates it. She hates how everything is handed to guys like Brad, who don’t have to be funny for girls to laugh at their jokes and don’t have to be nice for girls to like them because they are handsome and popular and rich and everything is owed to handsome, popular, rich people. 

And all Syd has is a crescent moon earring and the certitude that if she had kissed Dina under that streetlight with her earring in her hand, then- maybe, just maybe, Dina would have let her. 

“Look, I’m sorry that I said that,” Brad tells her as soon as they step one foot outside of the restaurant. “I was just talking.”

“Sure,” Syd says. Just like he forgot that she lived in the shittiest part of town before he called it a dump, or that she was standing right behind him in the lunch queue with Stan when he called her a  _ weirdo dyke _ when talking to Ricky Derry, or that she was standing next to Dina when he told her to come hang out with him, this party blows, with a wink and a nod. At that point, she isn’t even sure if he is consciously trying to undermine her in front of Dina or if she is simply that transparent to him, the small unfuckable girl with no boobs and short hair and freckles all over her face, so invisible he forgets she exists. 

Thinking about this makes Syd angry, and she came out here to she wouldn’t be angry, so she could focus on breathing in outside air instead of the food smells, count five things she sees and four things she hear and three things she touches and two things she smells and one thing she tastes, whatever the order is, fill her head with  _ happy thoughts,  _ as Ms Cappriotti calls them. For now, the only thought that sparks joy for Syd is the one of punching Brad in the middle of his douchebag face. 

“I forgot that you went to the counselor’s office. You’re not the, the fucking center of my world or something, okay?” he keeps going.

“Wow. Okay. This is your apology? This is really what you’re going for right now?” Syd tells him. She is frowning. Her shoulders are shaking. Her fingers dig into her palms, curling into fists. 

“I’m just  _ saying. _ It’s not about you.”

“Sure, Brad,” she says, smiling and nodding in fake understanding. Her teeth hurt from how much she is clenching her jaw. “It is not about me, because it’s about you, right? Because  _ when _ is it  _ not _ about Bradley  _ fucking _ Lewis, am I right?”

“Look at you! Right now! I’m trying to be nice to you,” Brad says, waving his arms around, his voice louder, “and you’re acting like such a  _ bitch!” _

“Oh,” Syd laughs. “That’s classy. A bitch, right, and a freak, and a dyke-”

“When have I ever called you a dyke-”

“Not to my face! All the fucking- all the fucking time!” she yells, ashamed of how her voice breaks in the middle of her sentence, ashamed of how much she wants to cry, not because she is sad but because she is so full of anger and self-loathing and plain loathing that it has to spill out  _ someway.  _ So instead she paces, from the lit-up bay window of the restaurant where a nice all-American family is eating to the gutter and back, as he stands against the glass, neck bent towards her somewhat to be able to look back at her, veins sticking out. Thick, all-American football star neck. 

“Because you  _ are _ one!” Brad shouts. It’s good that he is shouting now, just like her, not letting her down in being the crazy one around here. Really fucking kind of him. “No amount of fucking - fucking  _ Stanley Faggot Barber _ of all people - changes that! Because you  _ are!  _ And you’re, like, in  _ love _ with Dina!”

“Shut up.”

“You are- following her around like a puppy, always trying to get her attention-”

“Shut  _ up.” _

“Dina come smoke with me, Dina dance with me, Dina, Dina- you’re so obvious, and it’s fucking _ pathetic!  _ Just because she’s the only good thing in your fucked-up life doesn’t mean she’s ever going to be _ yours, _ okay?”

She isn’t sure what makes her break. 

Maybe it’s insulting Stan - she would like to think she is so honorable. Maybe it’s talking about her fucked-up life as if he knew anything about her family. Maybe it’s talking about Dina as if she’s  _ his. _ Maybe it’s him telling her everything she already knows about being glued to Dina’s side, about everybody being able to tell, about being pathetic and trying too hard and desperate and disgusting and  _ thanks very much, Brad, for this brand new information she absolutely did not already know.  _

Syd punches him. 

When she does it - or rather when she watches herself doing it, out of control, that trembling girl in front of her with her face screwed up in rage - a part of her sighs in relief. Oh, well, it’s not too bad. She stands at five feet tall and Brad has a good two heads on her, without counting the fact that she has not done sports since middle school and he is the star jock. At worst, he gets a black eye and she gets an awkward explanation to Dina, who is already furious after her anyway.

But when her fist connects with his jaw, he jumps backward. She barely has time to register the pain that flares through her hand, reverberates along her forearm, her shoulder, before he falls through the window and the sting of shards of glass cutting her cheeks fades into the broken hurt in her arm. She closes her eyes by reflex. 

When she opens them again, Brad is gaping at her, the upper half of his body in the restaurant, blood on his hands where he caught himself as he fell, red around his cheekbone. He is not the only one. The family who ate behind them - the restaurant staff panicking - Dina and Stan, peeking out of the open door, who knows for how long - all the noise and the stares and the lights flashing on the glass too bright and the people - 

Syd turns on her heels and runs away.

When she gets back to her house, Syd has run for so long she is out of breath. She gasps as she tries to get more air, lungs hurting and ears ringing in pain. Join the fucking club - at that point, between sore legs and aching joints, her dry raw throat after puking her guts out into the gutter a couple of blocks away from her house, both due to the exercise and to the fear, with her fucked-up hand and the blood dripping against her jaw, she has a hard time focusing on any part of her body that does  _ not _ hurt. 

Syd takes as big a breath as she can. She does not bother counting to five. 

She opens the front door and crosses the fingers of her left hand in the hope no one will be here. Of course karma, as they say, is a bitch.

Her mother is sitting in the kitchen, staring down an empty bottle of wine. That would be enough to make Syd wary about her, on any night, until she gets closer and realizes that there’s three of them, probably more than her mother could drink alone without going to the hospital, lined up on the table next to jars of jams and peanut butter, the fancy yogurts in glass tubs that Liam’s girlfriend likes and the glass that Syd broke on Tuesday. On Mondays, they collect glass waste, Syd remembers, so they make quickly sure everything has been rinsed and the lid was taken off before they take the trash out on Sunday evening - her mother is only, what, three days early.

For a second, Syd considers not going to her, because if tonight has proven anything it is that she is an asshole. Then she takes one more step and the wood creaks, which takes the option away anyway as her mother looks up sharply.

“Hi,” Syd says lamely. She is still in the shadows. This is fine. She can salvage this.

Her mother doesn’t answer for a bit. Then: “Do you really think I don’t love you?”

Shit. Shit shit shit shit. Can she even answer this honestly? Is there any way to answer that? They’ve never had a  _ conversation _ before. They have had conversations, sure, just not  _ conversations. _ “I don’t know. I just don’t think you  _ like _ me. Do you?”

Once again her mother takes a bit too long to answer, but then she gets up, walking towards Syd resolutely, and Syd has a second of panic to try to step backwards before her mother is in front of her. Whatever she was about to say dies on her lips when she sees Syd, who can only imagine what she looks like, dried blood sticky on her cheeks and lips spit-wet after throwing up. It is too bad, though, when she thinks about how important whatever her mother was about to tell her must have been. What an answer it would have been to her question, always on the back of her mind when she argues with her mother, that she loves her because she  _ has _ to. Just like Dina wouldn’t be her friend if they hadn’t moved here at the same time and Stan wouldn’t be either if they didn’t live a block away from each other.

But maybe there is an answer in the way she rushes to hold her face with words in between anger and worry. It’s in how her mother makes her sit on their kitchen chair while she pulls out the first aid kid and leans close to disinfect her scratches, still muttering in that angry-worried way, then in how she cleans her face with a warm washcloth as if Syd was a child again. All along Syd wants to cry, tries not to, leans into the touch, trembling still. She lets her mother nag her into going to the sink to brush her teeth but then struggles to remove Stan’s ruined shirt with her aching body not bending right and her head spinning, recoils when her mother first steps towards her but lets her help with it, lets her take care of her hand too even when it stings. 

Then, when Syd, at long last, falls apart, the answer is in how her mother holds her together against her chest. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now that i am not banned for my sins anymore i can say once again that my tumblr is @bisexualstanieluris and i'm ready 24/7 to talk about ianowt or answer prompts good night folks


	3. i need a dictionary (someone look me up and define me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Syd wakes up the next morning, alarm blaring, she doesn’t want to get up. This is neither unprecedented nor surprising. Actually, it’s pretty much just her ordinary way of life. Still, usually her strong desire to lay in bed all day stems more from a reluctance to see other people and complete despair at the idea of having to get up and do things. Not because she remembers committing a minor felony and ruining her friendship with Dina.
> 
> She contemplates whether punching Brad in his smug asshole face was worth it. Probably not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise bitch, thought you’d seen the last of me? well turns out the pressure and panic of a global pandemic isn’t an environment conducive to productive writing
> 
> spoiler alert I have no idea how the US justice for minors works but i DID google how long do hedgehog pregnancies last

When Syd wakes up the next morning, alarm blaring, she doesn’t want to get up. This is neither unprecedented nor surprising. Actually, it’s pretty much just her ordinary way of life. Still, usually her strong desire to lay in bed all day stems more from a reluctance to see other people and complete despair at the idea of having to get up and do things, not because she remembered committing a minor felony and ruining her friendship with Dina.

She contemplates whether punching Brad in his smug asshole face was worth it. Probably not. 

Eventually, though, she has to get up. It is not as if pushing the covers on top of her head and pretending the big bad world isn’t outside will be any good as a strategy, although she does give it a try for half an hour until the alarm clock points to eight and she wonders why the hell it was on so early anyway and-

Fuck. She forgot about detention.

Syd jumps out of bed, into her closet where she finds a mostly clean pair of jeans she puts on while jumping around trying to find her student ID, like a character in a John Hughes movie - her heart flutters when she remembers last night under the streetlamp, she wills it to shut up - and debates whether or not she has time to brush her teeth and whether or not she really cares. She runs her way downstairs, barging into the kitchen with a bang in the certitude that Liam is not up yet, and then - here’s her mother.

“Syd-”

_ “I don’t have time to talk right now I got detention,”  _ Syd gets out so fast she isn’t sure any word makes it out. 

“Syd.”

“Have you seen my jacket? Fuck, okay, whatever, I’ll just freeze my ass off-”

“Syd. I called school.”

“What?” Syd stops in her tracks. “Why would you do that?”

Pooled in the gentle light of the early morning, her mother is not looking at her, focusing on making another pot of coffee. The kitchen is spotlessly clean, with no trace of the blood that dripped onto it yesterday in tiny splotches. Obviously, someone had more trouble sleeping than Syd last night.

“Because,” her mother says, “I told them that you are not feeling well, which is true, and you might be ill, which is also true, so you should postpone it to next Saturday instead. They didn’t really give a shit.”

“Oh.” Syd doesn’t know what to say, so she flounders. “Uh. Thanks?”

“You’re welcome. Do you want some peanut butter and chocolate cake?”

Syd squints at her. 

Peanut butter and chocolate cake was an invention her mother made when Syd was six and it has always been Syd’s favorite cake ever since she was a child. She would beg her mom to make it on her birthdays and pretty much any Sunday. Peanut butter and chocolate cake sparks joy. Peanut butter and chocolate cake is what her mother bakes when she wants to tell Syd something she isn’t going to like, at all. 

So Syd knows this is a trap.

Syd also knows she threw up her dinner last night and is starving. 

“Sure, why not.”

Her mother is going to tell her the shitty news anyway. She might as well get cake out of it.

She sits down at the kitchen table where her mother cleaned her knuckles with strawberry soap and gets a cup of coffee big enough to drown into, since she might as well, at this point. In spite of her eyes feeling itchy and swollen after crying so much and the raw taste in her mouth that simply does not want to leave, this is probably the most restful night Syd has had in a while. No dreams. Still then coffee is necessary when the kitchen smells so much of it, coffee grounds and baking and something musty that Syd has learned to associate with home in the past couple of years. She waits for her mother to finish cutting the cake and watches dust dance into the ray of sunlight that pierces through their window and feels like a child. 

“I booked an appointment at the doctor for you,” her mother says as she hands Syd the plate of tiny yellow china. 

Syd frowns. “Yeah, that’s nice, but I don’t think you’re supposed to commit to the lie that much, Mom.”

She is busying herself with the dishes, her back to Syd. Her voice is rough but sharp. “Not that kind of doctor.”

“Uh. What do you mean?”

A dish makes a clinking sound as her mother puts it down. She stops. “It’s been… A few months ago, before the summer holidays, your school counselor and I talked. I don’t know if you remember.”

If she remembers. She was stressed out of her mind about that meeting. Wondering what kind of secrets the adults would say behind her back, _ oh that kid is really hopeless, isn’t she? Well, at least you tried. _ But then the meeting happened, her mother came out of it with a brisk step and a pissed-off expression, and Syd sprung out of the chair to follow as she complained that she had to take half a day off work for this, whatever this was. 

So, yeah, Syd remembers. “Sort of.”

“She told me that she thought you should see a therapist. But at the time we didn’t have money - I mean, we didn’t have money even more than today. And I was still- your father just died, so I was still really angry. That she thought I couldn’t- anyway, I said we could handle ourselves fine, thank you. And then, well, obviously we didn’t, did we?”

“I think we’re okay,” Syd says weakly. 

She isn’t even angry. She just feels confused, and dazed, and like nothing is real, that this kitchen with its still warm cake and baking dishes drying on the board was made up. She takes a bite of the cake and it’s delicious. One thing she tastes: peanut butter and chocolate combo. Two things she smells: cake and coffee. Three things she touches: the smooth iron of her spoon in her hand, the uncomfortable feeling of dirty jean on her legs, the press of the wooden table where she is leaning on her elbows on the table. 

Four things she hears: cars in the distance, her brother’s feet on the floorboards of his room above her head, Banana playing in her wheel, her mother’s ironic snort. 

“Oh, yeah, we’re great. Definitely. You just punched a window, and your brother adopted a pregnant hedgehog because we couldn’t get him a dog, and I’m never  _ here,” _ she says, her voice trembling on the last part, and Syd seriously hopes she doesn’t cry because she hasn’t seen her mom crying in a year. “And, oh, right, you punched a guy through a window.”

“It wasn’t that dramatic when it was happening,” Syd tries to defend herself.

“Oh, okay then! That makes it alright,” her mother laughs again. “Look. I’m your mom and anyway, this isn’t a debate we’re having. I’m telling you.”

“You can’t make me get therapy,” Syd says, hearing how silly it sounds even to her own ears. “What if- what if it doesn’t work? What if I don’t like him? What if he tries to brainwash me?”

“If he brainwashes you into not punching people through windows, I’d be fine with it,” her mother says dryly. “And if you don’t like him, your counselor gave me a couple of other names in the region, and we can try them out.”

Syd pauses. “I thought we didn’t have the money?”

“Don’t worry about it, Syd,” her mother cuts. “Finish your cake and wash your plate, then we’ll talk about your grounding for last night,” she adds, and there’s that on the topic. If Syd is honest, she thought it would go much worse than this. 

On the topic of things she thought would go worse are the repercussions of her destroying someone’s property and minorly assaulting Brad, who might be an asshole, but, apparently, still has rights. 

In spite of Stan best efforts to cover for her, as he tells her on Sunday afternoon hunched over the fences of Syd’s house, sending rabbity looks over his shoulder in the fear of Syd’s mom coming back and telling them off, considering the number of eyewitnesses to the fight and the fact that all of the restaurant staff saw them at the table earlier that evening, it becomes pretty obvious rather fast that Syd did it. 

“I think Brad is trying to put a restraining order on you,” he adds, not managing to quite keep his laughter off at this although Syd is not amused. “He kept screaming like a little girl that he never wants you to come anywhere near him again and that you’re a danger to society or whatever.”

Syd doesn’t point out that she  _ is _ a little girl and maybe also a danger to society. “Can he though? Wait, does that mean I don’t have to go to school anymore?”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure he can't. Plus, Dina got pretty mad at him after that. Me too, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Hopefully he won’t bother you anymore?” he says with hope but not much conviction. Syd feels pretty much the same. 

One good thing about being locked in is that she gets time to clean up her shit in the way she has been avoiding for months now, if only because it drives her crazy to look at the mess. She grabs a garbage bag and puts all the trash she shoved under her bed into it, the broken snowglobe and the ripped pink dress and her old favorite sweatshirt that she outgrew a long time ago, with moth holes all over it, the old homework she failed, a bunched up sheet where she drew a huge cartoonish spider with written failure on its back, then in another bag the clothes she hates in her closet and the books she’s never going to read for charity. When she is done, she gets to take a self-satisfied nap and feel an inch more functional.

Cleaning her floor, Syd remembers Dina lent her her battered copy of  _ The Perks of Being a Wallflower  _ a while back, which sits by the side of her bed all but forgotten. Of course, since it’s Dina, the book is corned and scratched at her favorite parts. Instead of reading it, Syd opens it and switches each page until she gets to the sentences Dina underlined. It feels strangely intimate to do this, to be reading what made Dina cry or laugh or curl up into bed and read more avidly, with emotions like a storm inside her. So when she is done with it, she goes to Dina’s copy of  _ Romeo and Juliet  _ that she borrowed so she could read it for their Literature exam in two weeks. She goes to  _ The Price of Salt, _ that she found laying around in Dina’s room and was interested in because of its old-school cover, two women smoking in a corner, one’s hand on the other’s shoulder, a man whose face was obscured by the light behind him, intruding, until Dina said Syd should take it and Syd accepted because she didn’t know what to say. She reads all of Dina’s favorite parts, about love confessions and girls flung out of space, and then, when she is done, she decides to start reading them.

Anyway, due to punching Brad technically being a misdemeanor, she gets court-ordered community service pretty much until she graduates. Her mother tells her she is lucky to still be seventeen. Mostly she thinks she is lucky Brad, although too petty to drop it, didn’t want everyone to know he was pressing charges against an underage girl half his size over a single punch. He only tried hard enough to be a nuisance but not so hard that it doesn’t blow over before he becomes the joke of the school. Syd considers doing her community service at Redstone Cemetery, because of how badass it sounds, but quickly drops it when she realizes her father is buried there, and how depressing that would be. Still, she walks over with flowers she stole from a neighbor’s garden to put them on his grave, neat and lined. It’s the first time she has been back.

In the end, it’s either Christian empowerment, building houses for the poor, Goodwill (which would be supremely awkward as this is where she gets her clothes from), or their local library. She chooses the library. They don’t choose her. She is about as tall as a gremlin, and with exactly as much strength, so she doesn’t see how the building program would be improved with her contribution, and she doesn’t really feel like picking up trash or whatever unless it’s her absolute last choice.

On top of that Syd also has to pay back the restaurant for the window. That blows, since she has all of no money. Her mother does it for her, of course, but she tells her sternly that it’s a loan and as part of her punishment she will have to pay her back. Syd thinks she’s just stingy. So she tries to get a job at the bowling alley with Stan, which doesn’t work because of that one time she and Stan got high and threw balls around and she wound up throwing hers at the wall and causing property damage. (Which is a worryingly recurring pattern in her life, now that she thinks about it.) Stan himself is on the verge of getting fired, apparently. Then her mother offers her a job at the dinner, but she doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about it either, and Syd would rather choke, so here’s that. For now, she gives guitar lessons to Stan for pocket money. The thing is, she doesn’t have a lot of time before her limited guitar knowledge is exceeded by his. 

The solution to one of these two issues happens, unexpectedly, thanks to Banana Wigglesworth’s slutty little sexcapades. 

“How is she doing, Doctor? Are the babies alright?” Liam asks the veterinarian very seriously. He also wondered if there was any way to do ultrasounds to know the sex of the baby, to which the veterinarian had said no, and Syd had to cheer him up by reminding him that hedgehogs didn’t know what gender was anyway and none of them knew Banana was female until two weeks ago.

“They are all doing fine, it shouldn’t be much longer now,” he says after doing some sort of poking and examining that looked random to Syd but professional enough to Liam.

Syd isn’t feeding into that nonsense, because even if she is the only one in the house willing to go along with Liam, she has limits, and weekly checkups are one of them. The veterinarian doesn’t seem to mind and keeps chattering away amiably with Liam while she looks at the corkboard. Missing dogs posters pinned, offers for a litter of kittens she hopes Liam doesn’t notice, a couple dogsitting numbers - maybe she should offer her services, hedgehog sitting must be a growing market after all - a notice for volunteer help needed, a colorful timeline of what dog ages mean in human years, someone selling their pet snake because they developed an allergy-

“Wait,” Syd says, out loud. She grabs at the sheet, black pencil on lined paper, obviously ripped from a notepad too hastily.  _ VOLUNTEERS NEEDED,  _ it says, then in lower cursive:  _ Do you love animals? Do you want to be useful for your community while helping people care for their pets? Are you interested in part-time volunteer work at the veterinarian clinic as an assistant or an aid for its pro bono activities? Talk to your veterinarian for more info! _

That would make her Liam’s hero forever. 

“Hey, sir,” she calls out to the veterinarian. “Is that spot still open?”

On her reading list, Syd moves on to a book called  _ Crush _ that Dina had lent her almost when they first met and that she had dismissed for being silly romance - what kind of book is called  _ crush _ apart from some PG-13 _ Fifty Shades of Grey  _ bullshit? When she realizes it’s all poems, she’s surprised, and she cries when she reads, _ What would you like? I’d like my money’s worth. / Try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this— / swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood / on the first four knuckles. We pull our boots on with both hands /but we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do / is stand on the curb and say  _ Sorry / about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. _ / I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time. _

It goes like this: Syd goes to the therapist every other Friday. Initially, the school wanted her to have more counseling sessions with Mrs. Capriotti, but since she is seeing an actual health professional they reluctantly let her see Mrs. Capriotti only on the Friday she isn’t at the therapist. 

On top of that, she works at the clinic on Tuesday and Thursday evenings as well as Saturday mornings, sometimes extending to Saturday afternoon if needed, which means she physically can’t get any detention, or she will miss her court-ordered community service. 

That changes a lot of things. First, she can’t afford to keep on with these grades, so she signs up, to her own revulsion, to a study buddy program that goes on during her Tuesday and Friday lunch breaks. If Dina happens to also sign up as a study buddy for the extra credit, it’s just coincidence. It’s not like they are talking much outside of school anyway, mostly due to Syd, who avoids her as much as she can without totally ruining their friendship. Sometimes she will catch sight of Brad talking to her in the hall and turn around to go the other way. 

Unsurprisingly, Dina is a totally awesome tutor.

“Metaphors.”

“It’s like, saying something is like something else, but not using, uh, comparison words? Like like or as?”

“Unlike what other rhetorical figure?”

“Uh,” Syd pauses. “Similes, right?”

“Yep, great!” Dina smiles quickly, and even that brief, fleeting grin makes Syd’s heart swell in her chest. The traitor. “Hyperboles.”

“I,” Syd stops herself. “Don’t remember.”

“It’s okay, we’ll come back to it later! Try oxymorons.”

“Oxymorons are,” Syd closes her eyes. Fuck. “They are.” She knows this. “They are like.” She knows this. This is so frustrating. “Me. I’m an oxy-moron.”

“You’re not a moron, Syd,” Dina frowns.

“I’m being tutored because if I get detention for my grades, I will miss my court-ordered community service because I  _ punched a guy through a window,”  _ Syd reminds her, wincing and closing her eyes, fists pushing against them as if it would help her headache. It’s a Thursday and she has to go to the clinic tonight. Life sucks.

“Okay, first of all? That sounds badass. Sydney Novak is a badass,” Dina points out. Syd guesses the punching Brad through a window part does, even though in real life, he pretty much jumped into it, and she has all the strength of an angry mosquito. Not the kind that actually stings either, the male ones, who suck your blood and scamper off and get squished against car windows. “Second of all. You may be a moron about making good life choices, but you’re not dumb. The American school system just sucks.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re the most brilliant person-” Syd’s eyes flutter open, slamming her hands against the table accidentally in her haste to push them off her face. “Wait! Shit! That’s a hyperbole. Something exaggerated that’s not supposed to be understood literally. And an oxymoron is when you put two things that are opposites close to each other, like Sydney Novak and badass. Hey, I do know some shit!” 

This time, Dina’s smile is wide and blinding. Syd remains gazing for a second as she beams too, dumbfounded, before shaking her head out of it and laughing. Dina’s knees, bare and under her skirt and thighs, brush against Syd even if neither of them is tall enough to warrant it. In winter, Dina wears these high socks that go up to her knees, which somehow looks hot on her even if Syd would look like a middle schooler in the same outfit, and this is early November. Where the weather was still gentle enough a couple of weeks ago after the Indian summer they had, now the warmth of the library is almost welcoming considering the harsh wind outside that makes Syd feels as if it was much colder than it really is. 

“Hey, what do you want for Christmas?” she asks on impulse. This is silly - she has never gotten Dina anything for Christmas, even if Dina always hands her one of the cheesy cards the school council sells for one dollar every year, and she isn’t even sure they are still friends, really. Or maybe they are still friends, just not best friends. But Dina looks so pretty smiling at Syd in pride, and so comfortable and warm, like fireplaces in the houses actors have in these stock Christmas movies that go on when no one is really watching, that something about her makes Syd want to come home.

“Uh,” Dina says, face scrunched up in confusion but in that way she does when she is also charmed by something weird Syd has said, that Syd knows is theirs only, because she has never seen Dina make that face at Brad or even Stan. “Do you want a list?”

Syd chuckles in disbelief. “What, you have one?”

“Of course! How else would my parents know what to get me?”

“I don’t know, have you tried dropping heavy hints that you need new shoes and oh, it just so happens that Vans has just the ones you like, isn’t  _ that _ wild?” Syd says as if she has ever wanted shoes. Usually, her father would push off Christmas shopping until he came on the day of the main event with a weird but incredibly on-point gift for Syd, a puzzle for Liam, and something coupley for their mother. As for Syd’s mom, she would give them something functional, like a somewhat nice sweater for Syd or drawing supplies for Liam. Only once did she have a sort of cool present for Syd, the Christmas she gave her a guitar another waitress was letting go of because it used to be her ex-boyfriend’s. 

Dina hums. “Interesting tactic. That would require talking to my mom, though.”

“With great Christmas presents come great responsibilities,” Syd sighs.

“Stop hanging out with Stan.”

“Ugh, I know. I hate it,” Syd says, but Dina laughs. 

Before Syd can bask in self-satisfaction, though, she stops, and she looks at Syd under her lashes, sheepish as she usually only was before asking Syd to hang out with Brad or something of the sort, as she rarely ever was around Syd. “You know what we haven’t done in a while? Gone to the mall on the weekend. That would be a cool Christmas present. I need new earrings, after all. You can buy them for me,” she adds. It would be cool and smooth if she hadn’t been staring at Syd’s hands while saying it a little too fast, and Syd find herself staring at her hands too, remembering the crescent moon shining on her left ear. 

“It’s November. Isn’t it a bit early for that?” she tries to joke.

“Not earlier than asking me for my Christmas list. Come on, you’ve been blowing me off for two weeks.” Then, softly: “I kind of miss you.”

In the end, of course, Syd says yes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> full disclosure this was supposed to be a one chapter ending but that one chapter wound up being 20 pages long so. four chapters bby! 
> 
> i’m in dire need of editing the last chapter (spoiler alert: wlw yearning to come), so it should be out next week - although life is kind of shit rn so i’m not making any promises
> 
> anyway as usual you can find me on tumblr @ bisexualstanieluris to be buds and i really, really appreciate every comment and kudo left on this fic, thank you!!


	4. i can change i can change i can change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have not brought up the Brad topic yet. 
> 
> Syd is a bit unclear on whether Dina and him are on some sort of break, or broken up, or something else entirely, based on how he keeps trying to approach Dina in hallways, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not getting there in time before she speedwalks out of his reach, but Dina never talks about him. Another thing is, also, that she seems to really, really enjoy making out with Syd. Which Syd isn’t complaining about. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> look. i wrote this chapter months ago and i am still not satisfied so i kept meaning to rework it and then not doing it and initially decided i would when the next season dropped and i'd get the motivation to rewrite it. now it turns out that, y'know, i can't exactly keep waiting for season 2. so i am posting it out of spite after asking louise to reread it (thank you!!) because if they're not giving us the funky ending syd, dina and stan deserve someone else has to
> 
> so yeah!! i hope it's of some comfort to everyone who read the fic and is emo about the cancellation right now - and if you want to rant about it or just talk about syd being a bisexual disaster you can hit me up on @the-amazing-spider-bi on tumblr! 
> 
> also the title is from ezra furman's i can change song!

They have not brought up the Brad topic yet. 

Syd is a bit unclear on whether Dina and him are on some sort of break, or broken up, or something else entirely, based on how he keeps trying to approach Dina in hallways, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not getting there in time before she speedwalks out of his reach, but Dina never talks about him. Another thing is, also, that she seems to really, really enjoy making out with Syd. Which Syd isn’t complaining about. 

She likes the other things, too - the things they did before, but that she feels allowed to like now, not monstrous for - brushing hands under the table to the dinner, sitting with their legs intertwined rather than on opposite sides of the bed, giggling behind the bookshelves of the library, Dina’s sleepy smiles when they just had one hour of American History and she struggled not to fall asleep. 

Seeing Brad head her way with anger in his eyes, though, isn’t one of them. 

“Hi, Sydney,” he says politely enough, “can we talk for a minute?”

“Actually, Stan is waiting for me,” she starts, but before she finishes he has grabbed her arm with a hold of steel and is pulling her behind him, towards the gymnasium, “hey! Ever heard of consent, dickhead?”

He acts like he didn’t hear her and keeps dragging her behind until they are in the empty changing rooms - there is probably a cheer squad practice going on right now, since they are filled with girls’ stuff, colorful bags and pastel clothing strewn, a few flowery deodorants and stray lipstick. Syd isn’t too fond of the girl’s changing rooms since, you know, forever, and she is especially not fond of getting caught there when she is not supposed to, with a guy, when she’s supposed to be laying low and avoiding trouble.

What follows is a mess of pleas _ (you’re her best friend, can’t you just tell her to hear me out? I miss her) _ , which Syd does not care for one bit, and actively ignores, before he comes to poorly concealed threats of the passive aggressive bullshit kind, which send Syd reeling with bitterness in her throat, digging shorts nails into her palms while trying not to connect her fist with his face  _ (if you’re so tough, how come you got knocked out by a five feet tall loser, uh?).  _ She tries to do what her therapist says, she tries to remember to breathe, and she tries to picture the expression on her mother’s face when she woke up that Saturday morning. 

Still, when Brad storms out, Syd throws Random Cheerleader n°3’s bag across the room and crouches down on the floor to freak out in peace. 

It takes Syd sneaking out of the locker room, going back home to rip apart some old bedsheets in what she tells her mom is a school craft project, and three hours of lying on her back in her bed listening to Bloodwitch moodily to realize this: Dina broke up with Brad. 

She turns to lie on her belly with her face in the pillow to freak out in silence a second time. 

The week runs past Syd, sluggish and too fast all at the same time. Filled with a sort of manic energy whenever she walks past Brad in the hallway or talks to Dina at lunch, leg vibrating under the table with something like anticipation, Syd distracts herself however she can. It’s not that hard: she thinks about colleges, hears about colleges, from Dina and Stan and her mother and every single teacher in the entire fucking school, apparently. She goes to get some volunteering done at the veterinary clinic. She goes to the comics shop (ugh), the video games store (ugh), the record store (ugh) with Stan, hangs out there enough that she hears they need someone to work part time, tries to ignore the delighted expression on Stan’s face, and remembers that beggars can’t be choosers. Dina tries to pull up Syd’s average harder than Syd does and marginally succeeds. Syd smokes weed with Stan while listening to records he bothered her at the store to give him a discount on (store policy is store policy), decides with Stan that maybe they need to stop pot for a bit, lasts only a week before they’re back in his basement again. 

Most nights, between homework and volunteering and her job, after hanging out with Stan or Dina and, still, sometimes, taking care of Liam or groceries or any other chore her mother can’t deal with that day, she crashes into her bed and sleeps through the night, through her alarm, until her mother wakes her up by shouting downstairs that it’s almost time for school.

Life kind of sucks and it’s kind of great all at the same time. She tries not to question it too much and cuts her fringe on a whim when she does. Calling Stan in a panic to fix this mess is distraction enough. (Turns out, Stan isn’t much better at homemade haircuts than her, but her mother’s bangs game isn’t too shabby.)

When Syd climbs into Dina’s car on Sunday to go to the mall like good American girls do, Dina’s phone is plugged to the speakers with a worn red cable whose tiny electric cables are exposed as often as they are protected. Her brother’s, then. He has never been good at taking care of his shit, even as Dina always dusts the top of her bookshelf and makes her bed in the evening before lying in it. Syd used to mock her about it, making her bed only to mess it up. Dina insists it’s more comfortable to be tucked in a made bed than in a heaping nest of covers. 

“Nice song,” Syd says, nervous, for lack of anything better, just as it shifts to something else, with a slightly faster pop beat and the gentle voice of a girl.

“Oh, that’s dodie,” Dina tells her. Her eyes are on the road, and Syd is staring at her. Some metaphor or shit. “I really like her. I just feel like she sings about a lot of real stuff, you know?”

She was just singing about yearning after a friend who doesn’t like girls, about hair that smells like lemongrass and sleep and mistaking parted lips for invitations to kiss, all of these sounding a little too real to Syd, who is not going to tell Dina about it.

“Her voice is nice,” is all Syd says, which makes Dina purse her lips and Syd wince at how lame she sounds. “Hey, so, can you believe Stan has never watched Rocky Horror?”

“What? Oh my god, Syd. You have to save his soul, you know that.”

“I know! We should totally show him what he’s missing.”

The use of we, somehow, seems to brighten up Dina. “Oh, definitely! You don’t work on Monday nights, right? We can have a sleepover.”

“Oh, your parents are going to let a boy sleep in your room? They don’t even let  _ me _ stay over ever since I cut my hair.”

“I don’t think it’s so much your boyish looks,” Dina smiles as she stops at a red light, the singer on the stereo sings about staring into someone’s eyes before the light switches to green, appropriate as always, “as your sparkly personality.”

“Nah, it’s definitely because I look like a pretty boy,” Syd says, and does her best pretty boy smile at Dina, who keeps staring with dark eyes - and staring - and staring - until someone honks and they both jump. The light is green. Dina raises her foot too fast on the clutch pedal and the car stalls, so she has to hurry with jerky movements as the guy in a hurry behind doubles past them. 

Through her open window, Syd can hear him saying something about women behind the wheels and female dogs and she sticks her upper body out of the window to shout: _ “FUCK YOU TOO, DICKHEAD,” _ with extra middle fingers raised. She turns back to Dina. By the time the car has started again, the light has gone back to red - traffic lights are so weirdly timed in here. Fucking Brownsville. “Are you okay?” she asks Dina, trying for soft, reaching out her hand to tug at her shoulder on instinct.

Dina shrugs and nods at the same time. It looks weird, and Syd must raise her eyebrows because Dina clarifies: “I’m not okay with  _ this,  _ but I’m okay.”

“Fuck men,” Syd says solemnly. “They wouldn’t know how to drive if the stick jumped in their hands.” Her father was the smoothest driver she knew, even as a stoner - his turns always so light and fluid her mother could have a cup of coffee in hand and not a drop would be spilled on her uniform.

“Didn’t you fail your driving exam last summer?”

“That’s… Irrelevant.” 

Dina laughs, and starts the car to pass the green light in one fluid motion, speeding a little as they roll in the bowels of a tunnel, yellow lights sparking up around them and inside of Syd as she listens to Dina laugh. She refrains from making any reference to  _ The Perks of Being a Wallflower, _ because it would make Dina all too happy after she basically forced her to watch it, but she thinks that if people could be infinite Dina would, with her silences and gentle hands and the way she doesn’t give up on anyone or anything. 

“Oh my god, I used to love ice skating when I was a kid,” Dina smiles when she sees the overpriced, sort-of-crowded ring they made at the center of the food court, where they usually sat and ate burritos or bagels back when they came to the mall regularly enough. 

“Oh, yeah. Wanna go?” Syd asks. 

“Nah, I’m fine. These things are always super expensive. It’s a waste of money anyway,” Dina tells her. “Let’s go eat something.”

Syd considers her for a second while she debates the virtues and downfalls of bagel versus burrito, which is an epic battle worthy of both their attention usually, but today isn’t as interesting as the face Dina made when she shrugged off ice skating. 

Syd grabs her sweater sleeve as she makes a beeline for the ring entrance, with its cheesy purple fairy lights strung about under aluminium moons and stars. 

“Hey! What are you doing?”

“We’re gonna skate,” Syd shrugs. “You said you liked it.”

They stop behind a family of four whose mother is patting her pockets for her cash. Dina frowns at Syd. “Yeah, and you hate it.”

“That’s not true.”

“When we went on Donna’s birthday, you fell like five times and then sat on the bleachers all day,” she points out. Ah, yes, Donna’s birthday. Dina wound up spending half the afternoon making lazy circles around where Syd was sitting until she cracked up with laughter at something Syd said and fell herself. They were not reinvited the following year.

“That’s an exaggeration,” Syd lies. “And anyway, I didn’t like looking like an idiot in front of your friends. I don’t care about looking like an idiot in front of you, who already knows I’m an idiot.” Then, as the family walks away and before Dina can complain: “Two tickets, please. Uh, high schooler… Prices… If you have them?”

The clerk chews slowly on her gum. “Student ID?”

“Uh,” Syd fake laughs. “Do I look like I’m eighteen?”

“Store policy.”

“What kind of store policy is this? This isn’t even a real rink- come on, man, I don’t even look like I’m in middle school,” Syd protests, digging her nails into her palms.

“It’s okay,” Dina intervenes. “I have mine on me- wait a sec- yeah, here you go!” 

She hands it off with a bright smile and sparkling eyes,with more chill and politeness than Syd has ever had in her entire life, and the clerk doesn’t even look at it longer than a glance before she hands it back and takes Syd’s hard-earned money and waves them off to where they will get to sit on benches and put on other people’s sweaty skates. All along Dina insists to pay back Syd, who refuses and calls it her early Christmas present, until she tries to make a grab for Syd’s jacket pocket anyway and Syd fights her off, laughing, forgetting how much they’re nibbling away from their allotted one hour. 

When they come on the rink finally, the crowd has thinned a little around the big, sparkly green artificial Christmas tree that they already pushed at the center, in the middle of the dangling fake stars and the strings of lights that make Dina glow in shades of purple and pink, as if she too was out of this world, flung out of space.

Syd thinks very loudly:  _ I love you.  _ Instead of saying it, she takes Dina’s hand and lets her, skating backwards, try to show her how to follow suit, and when she inevitably falls down and drags her along with her, they both laugh, and she pretends Dina’s legs pressing on both sides of her waist don’t make her heart race.

Dina makes rounds and eight-figures and tries to show off on one foot for a second before she loses balance, and Syd, all gangly limbs and uncertainty, gently slides while gripping the bar and looks at Dina. Sometimes she gets blown a kiss. All in all, it may be worth the thirty dollars. 

By the time they get to the car, nighttime is falling again, Dina bought new star studs that match Syd’s, which Syd said was cheesy, and there are probably more bruises on her thighs than pimples, which should be a nice change. This time, at the red light, when Syd looks at the driver’s seat to find Dina watching her smile at something she said, the strange geometrical lights of lamp posts and washed out red of traffic dancing on her skin, Dina leans forward, or maybe Syd does too, and she kisses her. Her lips against Syd feel nothing like they did on that stranger’s bed, moving slow and certain, hand on her neck a solid warmth. Syd is electric. 

Neither of them minds as much when the light turns back green and the car behind them drives past. 

“Do you know how to play Super Smash Bros?” Stan asks Dina when she gets down to his bedroom. After all this time they’ve been friends, smoking joints on the roof of the gym and doing their homework together at the diner, Syd can’t believe this is only the first time they are all meeting here. She feels strange about it, as if she was introducing her dorky family to cooler, more sophisticated people, except Dina has never been sophisticated in her life and Stan is both dorky and the coolest person she knows, all at the same time. 

“The one with the cars?” Dina asks.

“Oh my god,” Stan says. He looks at Syd, like, _ can you believe this? _ And Syd shrugs back just as solemnly,  _ I don’t know, can we?  _ “Have you been living in a cave the past ten years? No, I’m genuinely asking. Was this whole Brad thing, like, a weird Stockholm syndrome thing-”

“Stan!” Syd says. 

Sure, Dina and her may have kissed that one time in the car. (And then in Dina’s kitchen a bunch of times when Syd made pancakes and Dina helped by sitting on the counter and doing nothing related to the stove, and that one time in the girls’ locker room when nobody was around, and a couple of times on the roof of the gym, and once quickly in the diner a day her mother wasn’t here, and alright, they have kissed a lot more than that one time, but somehow they all seem like one-offs, as if Syd could just not get used to that idea, that she gets to kiss  _ Dina _ on the regular. Every time she can’t quite believe this is happening to her. That she is Dina’s _ something.  _ Kiss buddy. Whatever.)

“No, let the man speak,” Dina says, making a face, as if she was considering it. “He has a point.”

“No offense, but Dina, but your taste in people is just,” Stan sighs deeply, “honestly, I don’t get it. Like, you’re so cool, and your girlfriend is-”

_ “Stan!”  _ Syd says again.

“Several points,” Dina says, grinning, and she sticks her tongue at Syd behind Stan’s back when he plugs the GameCube. Syd throws her the finger and doesn’t swoon when her hair is ruffled. 

They are on hour two of Smash Bros, Dina resolutely getting the basics of the game and going from an absolute disaster who tries to distract Syd to win (and, Syd is shameful to admit, mostly succeeds) to pretty decent at getting Kirby to mercilessly swallow their characters before it barfs them off over an edge and they fall to their death. This is a coward’s technique, in Stan’s very vocal opinion, which he explains at length while Dina runs her hand in Syd’s hair (she keeps hearing the way Stan had said  _ girlfriend _ and Dina had told him he made  _ several points)  _ until Liam barges into the house. 

Within five minutes, they’re in Stan’s piece of shit car, him trying to drive that wreck faster than 15mp/h, Liam on the front seat insisting that they need to be at the clinic ten minutes ago. 

“This hedgehog isn’t wearing a seatbelt,” Dina whispers to Syd in the backseat, smiling.

“Please don’t tell Liam that,” Syd whispers back. 

Dina’s parents call her twice while they wait for the veterinarian to come out: once to check up on her and ask why she hasn’t come back home an hour ago as planned, the second time because they hung up in annoyance when they thought she was messing with them about having to help a hedgehog deliver its babies. Apparently, they came to the conclusion that maybe their daughter had a weird secret life, and they had to respect that, but they were still picking her up in fifteen minutes to come eat dinner at home. Dina apologizes profusely. Syd thinks it’s pretty sane, and actually more worrying that her mother just accepted it with a sigh and a reminder to be home before curfew, as if Syd didn’t sneak out at least once a week to sleep over at Stan’s. Guess that went unnoticed.

_ “Liam _ needs sleep,” her mother insists suspiciously on the phone. 

Maybe not that unnoticed. “Yes, jeez, mom, of course he’ll be back soon.” Liam shakes his head vehemently and Syd shushes him. “He- oh, he has a math exam tomorrow? No, he did not mention that,” she glares at him - alright, Syd doesn’t give a shit about maths, but still, way to put her in hot water with their mother - as she silently mouths something a little unkind. “Yes, of course I’m listening to you. Stan will bring in home in one hour. I’ll- take care of it. Okay?”

“We can’t leave Mrs. Wigglesworth alone!” Liam protests as soon as she’s done. “Look at her! She is clearly unwell!”

“She kinda looks like she’s napping,” Stan points out. “Is she supposed to be doing that?”

“I’m not actually a veterinarian, Stan,” Syd starts saying before correcting herself in front of Liam: “but I am a hedgehog expert and this is perfectly normal hedgehog behavior. She’s just resting up.”

“She’s basically shaking with anxiety,” Liam answers. Syd takes a look at Banana. Nope. Still sleeping. 

“I looked it up on one of the computers at school a few days ago,” Stan starts, which, weird, but sure, “and by the way, almost got my library privileges revoked for this, so you’re welcome - anyway, it says it can take anywhere between fifteen minutes and a few hours.” He throws Banana a side glance. “I think it’s the second type.”

“Well, excuse me, I didn’t know you had a hedgehog degree from hedgehog school.”

“I’m a man of multiple talents.”

He raises his eyebrows, and she too, making the same face back at him, until he cracks and lets out a chuckle, looking away from her. She too turns away to hide her smile. In the waiting room, next to two older ladies with tiny dogs and a guy in his late twenties whose cat in a box seems very interested in fighting said tiny dogs, lungs full of that asepticized javel smell that lingers in in every clinic coupled with a strong whiff of wet dog hair, Syd wonders how it is that she comes here enough that this is all so familiar. Or rather, she knows what led her here - she just takes a moment to think of how foreign it would all be at the beginning of their school year. When she thought Stan was a dorky guy living next block - or didn’t think of Stan at all, more accurately. When she would probably have not, no matter how much she loves her brother, driven to a veterinary clinic in the late evening so he can be reassured about the fate of his promiscuous pet, who doesn’t give a shit either way. Mostly because she didn’t have a car. But still. 

It takes half an hour more before Syd resigns herself to the fact that they have to send Liam home. It takes an hour before Liam himself accepts it.

“But who’s going to keep an eye on Banana?” he complains, scowling at Syd, and she absolutely refuses to believe she looks like this when she makes that face herself. “No offense, but I can’t trust you with her. You’re basically a wanted criminal.”

“Wow. Rude.”

“Yeah, Syd has been punished already. Now she’s just a criminal.”

“Not helping, Stan.”

“Sorry.”

“And anyway,” she goes on. “You know how it is, Goober. Either Stan drives you back home and I get to stay here and keep an eye on Miss Wigglesworth, or Mom comes here in half an hour, furious, and none of us do. You know how Mom is.”

“That’s true,” Liam mutters. “To be fair, I don’t think Mom would be angry at  _ me.” _

“Yeah, that’s fair.”

“But I don’t like it when you fight either.”

“That’s kinda sweet, Goob.”

He is still frowning and unsure. Miserable, to be honest. So Syd does something she isn’t very used to, and frankly isn’t sure she’s too good at, and crouches a little before putting both her arms around Liam, hands splayed on his back. She expects him to be stiff, or kind of weird about it, like she is, but he instantly lets go, hugging her right back. Distractedly, she notes that he is getting to be as tall as she is, which is all kinds of insulting, then he does this sort of  _ thing,  _ where he melts against her shoulder and sniffles, and the urge to protect him comes back tenfold. 

It’s nice. Even if a couple of other people look at them hugging in the middle of the waiting room as if they were crazy, and Stan uncomfortably shuffles from foot to foot. It’s kind of very nice. 

It takes five more minutes of him saying his goodbyes to a heartbroken Banana Wigglesworth before Stan can take him away, driving all the way to their place then back. 

“You know,” Stan says conversationally later that evening, while they’re carefully not watching Banana give birth in her box in the back of his car, after the veterinarian told them - as expected - that there was really nothing he could do, “once the little things are like, you know, pushed out, you’re supposed to leave them alone for a week.”

Syd lowers the volume a little on his radio, where Prefab Sprout is playing, due to Stan being a dork. “You really know wayyy too much about this.”

“What? I’m your best friend! I’m invested in your life!”

“More than  _ me.” _

He scoffs, smiling at her still. “Yeah, like that’s hard.”

Syd scowls at him, but that doesn’t sting the way it should - maybe because they’re both exhausted and trying to give intimacy to a rodent, or maybe because they’re close enough, now, that she doesn’t mind as much. To be fair, he is in his car with her at one in the morning because she wanted to make her brother feel better about his pet. 

“Okay, why are we not supposed to talk to them for a week?” she asks.

“You gotta leave her alone time to bond with the babies,” he says like it’s a normal thing to tell someone. “Or else she can abandon them. Or worse.”

She pretends to pause to think, nibbling at a spoonful of peanut butter from the jar she just snuck in her house to get. “Give them lifelong trauma and mental health issues?”

“Nope!” Stan tells her cheerfully. “Eat them.”

“What?”

“Yep.”

“Yeah, there’s no way that’s true.”

Stan shrugs. “Google it.”

She turns to squint at the backseat, where the hedgehog is squeaking in relative confusion. “Wow. That’s so messed up, Banana.”

She has four tiny, pink and white, ugly babies. They kind of look like spiky thumbs, in Syd’s opinion. They’re the best thing Liam has ever seen. 

Or at least, that’s what he tells her the next morning.

Their mother doesn’t contribute to the debate. She just looks tired.

Stan decides that since he drove them to the clinic and stayed up all night (or until two, but he is never one to miss an opportunity to be dramatic after all) he gets to name at least one of them, which she regrets allowing when he instantly chooses Hog-zilla. Of course, Dina thinks it’s hilarious.

Though Dina, as Syd finds, has way better arguments than Stan’s. 

So, yeah. Cannibalistic mother hedgehogs. In all of this mess, Syd kind of misses all the excitement over college applications. Dina, though, is obsessed by them - understandably, since she has a good chance of getting a scholarship for a pretty decent school, if not the inaccessibly Ivy League myth. A positive side effect of avoiding Dina was getting to ignore the fuss, which always left her bitter and angry. What kind of college will take a student with poor grades, frequent detentions jotted down on her file next to “behavioral issues” and no money to speak of? Yeah, Syd doesn’t really want to hear about what bright future is ahead for Brownsville students. 

For all she knows, Stan seems to feel the same way, which is why she is surprised when she comes over to his room to tell him Liam accepted his idiot pet name and finds college applications under an empty mug of coffee. Or rather, surprised isn’t the good word: cheated, maybe, or betrayed, like they were in this together, the shitty town and no future, talks of driving away in his shitty car after graduation to go somewhere, anywhere, that has more than five thousand inhabitants and their shitty family lives. She knows it isn’t fair, though. Maybe a month ago Syd would have panicked and stormed out, but today’s Syd tries to remember that other people aren’t abandoning her simply because they want to move on. It doesn’t work very well. 

It’s fine. She can just put them back, ignore it and pretend it’s not there. She’s an expert in this. Her entire family has a Ph.D. in Denial. It’s fine.

“Oh,” Stan says from the top of the stairs, looking at her looking at the applications. 

So much for Denial, then. “UCA, uh?”

“Yeah,” Stan says, a bit breathless, but his hands shoved into his pants’ pockets, pretending to be chill. “They have this, uh, college of fine arts-”

“And California Institute of the Arts… Academy of Art University.”

“Well, you know.” Stan shrugs self-consciously. “California is the best place to study the music industry.” He shrugs again. “It’s not like I have a shot, anyway. They’re, like, crazy selective, and I’d need a full ride, so. Whatever. I’d just be dumb not to apply, you know?”

“Oh, yeah. Super dumb. Not applying to any college,” Syd nods. “What are these people thinking, right?”

Surprisingly, she finds that she wants to cry more than she wants to get angry. It’s a weird change. As well as an unwelcome one. 

“I mean, I also applied to loads of community colleges nearby. I figure, you know, I study business for a few years in Pennsylvania, then I get to leave this shithole and work in a vinyl store, try to send resumes to music companies.”

“I didn’t even know you wanted to work in music,” Syd says, which feels like a lie even to her own ears when she has listened to him rank in great detail the best platforms per type of music for an entire hour while high.

“I’m not dead set on music. Anything creative would be fine. Clothes. Comics. Stuff. I just- I don’t want to work on something I don’t give two shits about, you know? Doesn’t matter what the job is.”

“Yeah. You don’t want to be a manager in a regional mid-range insurance company,” she quotes more or less accurately. 

Stan looks relieved. “Yeah, exactly!” A beat. “Sorry, I should have told you about it-”

“What? No, dude, don’t worry-”

“No, no, it wasn’t cool that it was how you heard about it, it’s just that I had to hide it from my dad-”

“Hey, you really don’t have to justify anything to me, it’s fine-”

“It’s just, it’s not even going to happen, it’s so fucking dumb-”

“Stan, shut  _ up!” _ He shuts up, by which she means his mouth slams shut and he gulps. She continues with what she hopes is a slightly less aggressive tone. “It’s not dumb, okay? And you have awesome grades. You’re totally gonna get in, like, at least one of those. You’re super smart, and you want it more than anyone. They’d be idiots not to take you. Okay?”

“Okay,” Stan says, really soft. He smiles. “Okay,” he repeats. “Yeah. I’m gonna get it.”

“Of fucking course you are,” Syd says, and smiles too, finding herself meaning it.

“And when I drive to California, you’ll pack your things, and you’ll be in the passenger seat, making middle fingers to my dad for me while my hands are on the wheel, okay?”

Syd is shocked silent for a second, which is enough to make Stan jittery, as if he was going to take it back as a joke any moment now, before she says: “Yeah, okay. Sounds like a plan. I’m warning you, though, we’ll probably have to take at least three of Banana’s twelve kids. This beast is super fertile. Even by hedgehog standard.”

“Ah, yes,” Stan nods wisely, “must be all the hedgehog orgies she had. Multiple partners, multiple fathers for her twelve kids.”

“Hey, don’t slutshame Banana! It’s hard being a single mother in a man’s world.”

This is when they both crack up and lose it. Maybe, Syd thinks, the future isn’t so dire, with Stan and their shabby California/Arkansas/other unspecified West Coast state bedroom and their shared three hedgehog babies. Maybe this can be enough, as long as they don’t try to reproduce in between them. The hedgehogs, not her and Stan. 

For now, they sit down and play on his GameCube and Syd wonders if maybe she should look up any community college shitty enough to take her in with a part-time program, somewhere in the unspecified cities where the universities Stan is applying to reside. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then stan and her move into a cramped two-bedrooms (fourth floor, always broken elevator) in california near her campus even though he has to take his car to drive to his classes because he misses his bus every morning. dina calls her every day to tell her about that thing her roommate said today. this first year they take turns visiting each other (but it's mostly dina, since she likes hanging out with stan better than syd likes hanging out with dina's roommate, and the weather is nicer in cali). maybe one day they will break up or maybe they won't, but for now they're doing great. 
> 
> syd tries to call home at least once a week - her brother bullies her into it so the hedgehog babies don't forget her voice. she gets along better with her mother now that they don't have to live together. 
> 
> syd also tries to dye her hair in their bathroom and has to go to a hairdresser to salvage it. she finds another therapist in her new city and her mother helps her pay for him. she's tired but happy. neither her nor dina ever hear from brad again. banana finds yet another slutty, slutty mr wigglesworth: they have another set of babies out of wedlock (the scandal!). the end.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Lu for putting up with my dramatics and betaing stuff after making me go to bed at 1AM you're the real beautiful bastard


End file.
